


Apples and Elbow Room

by secretagentfan



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretagentfan/pseuds/secretagentfan
Summary: Sharing space isn't easy, and then there's the issue with the apples...Written for the No.6 secret santa 2019!
Relationships: Nezumi/Shion (No. 6), Safu & Shion (No. 6)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 61





	Apples and Elbow Room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fatalize](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatalize/gifts).



> Happy secret santa day Iwatch-theworld! I was so excited to get to write for you and it’s been a blast. I hope you enjoy this!!!!!!

It wasn’t as though Shion had a problem with apples. Four apples typically rested in a bowl on top of his—no—their microwave and were restocked regularly. Apples were versatile: apple pie, apple sauce, apple strudel, apples with peanut butter; travel-sized—he could eat them on his way to work and they fit easily into his bike basket! They were perfect for a snack after a meeting, no preparation, all he had to do was unwrap and chew. Wow, actually, Shion loved apples.

Crunch.

The problem was: Nezumi loved apples too.

Two months. It had been two months since Shion had convinced the most attractive person he had ever met to move in with him. Nezumi, who arrived with storms, and brought only what he could carry on his back. Nezumi, who filled the uncharted, unlovable, corners of Shion’s soul with sun-dappled forests. Nezumi, who, after years of survival, travel, and soul-searching apparently never learned how to quietly consume a piece of fruit.

Crunch.

Shion was not going to be able to continue his usual mid-afternoon nap like this. He stood up, accidentally kicking a new translation of the Miser off the bed. He shut his eyes. Even though Nezumi only brought what he could carry, that had not stopped him from buying what amounted to a whole bookstore—and no bookshelves— for Shion’s apartment.

Crunch.

“Nezumi, we should kiss now.”

The offer echoed in the bedroom, louder than it had any right to. Nezumi had only just slid under their covers, shining new copy of The Misanthrope in one hand, apple in the other. He froze mid-bite: mouth hovering a couple inches from the fruit he was only (oh god) halfway through.

“Did I seduce you somehow?” His voice was airy. Shion would call it sexy, but he hadn’t put the apple down yet and the crunching was still at the forefront of his mind.

“No,” Shion admitted.

“Do I even want to know your reasoning, then?”

“Probably not.”

Nezumi’s eyebrows tilted inward and raised, just so, as he set his book down. He looked at Shion as if he were a dancing street monkey and pulled a tissue from the box on their bedside table with the air of a lounging emperor plucking a grape out of a servant’s hand.

He set the apple down on the tissue, tilted his head to one side then to the other, cracking his neck, and waited. Shion slumped further into the pillows in a way he hoped was alluring. The corners of Nezumi’s mouth quirked upward.

“How does the mysterious Shion want to kiss, then?”

Shion blinked. He didn’t do much thinking when it came to kissing. It usually just…happened. Unreliably. At unexpected, beautiful moments. Like what now could be.

“How?” he repeated.

“Yes, Shion. How. You issued an invitation less than a minute ago, if you remember correctly.”

The mattress squeaked as Nezumi lazily crawled over Shion, flopping on top of him with an ease that warmed Shion to the tips of his ears. He was heavy. Shion ran his fingers through Nezumi’s hair, cut during his travels, and placed his hands on his shoulders. He stopped. Raised both eyebrows. Took his hands off Nezumi’s shoulders.

“Do you need guidance?” Nezumi asked, voice low enough to make Shion’s toes curl. Or rather, it would have, if Shion wasn’t now distracted. Nezumi cleared his throat. “Shion?”

“Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about your shoulders.”

“I– my shoulders?”

“They’re broad now. You’ve really filled out.”

Shion wrapped his arms around Nezumi, hands resting open-palmed on his back, feeling the space between each shoulder blade.

“Shion do you want to make out or not?”

“You never accepted my original invitation,” Shion pointed out, unable to resist the impulse to be difficult. Nezumi’s breath huffed against his nose. Shion grinned. “Luckily, my offer remains the same, Nezumi.”

Arms snaked under Shion’s waist. Nezumi’s nose tickled Shion’s hair, a little colder than the rest of him, which made Shion smile. His lips brushed Shion’s forehead, then over his right temple, just barely; any remaining annoyance Shion still felt dripped away. Two months. Had it really only been two months?

Two years had nothing on the way Nezumi’s breath felt against Shion’s lips as he leaned closer.

“Very well then, Shion,” Nezumi began, the hint of a laugh in his voice. “Past distractions aside: allow me to formally accept your invitation.”

“Good,” Shion replied, and pulled Nezumi down the centimeter required to mack his face off. His hands rubbed up and down Nezumi’s back, carefully brushing the raised skin of his scar and catching in his night shirt. In his mind, he heard a storm, and felt a familiar tug at his heartstrings: the age-old desire to protect the warm, solid body in his arms.

* * *

The thing was, Shion was exceptionally skilled at loving Nezumi from far away. Working, shopping, and living and breathing—his love of Nezumi during their separation was a precious foothold in a chaotic world, unshakable— carried in his core as easily as his ribs, his heart. His love was a compass, guiding him from a world away.

Now, Nezumi was not a world away, he was here. In Shion’s space, sleeping on his—their couch, or buried in a pile of books. Or maybe he was out, on a walk or at an audition, but he’d leave behind the signs of him, a rock he found at the park, a dog-eared script, a bag of chips he was hoarding for later. Nezumi was not a compass. He was…a bit of a mess to clean up after actually. Not a pillar, but a human. How had Shion forgotten? Nezumi was infuriating.

“Nezumi and I are incredibly compatible,” Shion concluded.

Evidently this was not the thing to say while Safu was refilling her coffee as she spilled it all over the table when she burst out laughing. “Safu!"

“Sorry, I’m sorry!” Safu mopped up the spilled coffee with a handful of napkins, covering her mouth with her other hand in a polite attempt to get the unfriendly café staff to stop shooting them nasty looks for being loud and destructive.

They had gotten coffee here every Thursday for four years, and never once had the staff greeted them with a smile or any degree of familiarity. Most people hated this place for its unfriendly atmosphere. For Safu and Shion, who more often than not were caught up in interviews or Reconstruction meetings, not having to talk to one more person with a fake smile was ideal. The hours they had spent in this miserable little coffee shop were some of the most precious in Shion’s adult life.

“I was being serious, Safu! I feel very strongly about this! We are–”

“Please, Shion, please stop talking,” Safu wheezed. Shion felt his face heat and he obediently sipped his coffee. Safu shook her head, wiping a tear from her eye.

“Please tell me– how did we go from Nezumi’s concerning apple habit to this?”

Shion wanted to hide his face in the table. “I felt as though I should say something else. Something that wasn’t a complaint about him.”

“Shion, do you want me to speak honestly?”

No, Shion thought pathetically, his stomach sinking. I want you to say what I want to hear, sometimes.

Safu smiled at him, and he relaxed slightly. As harsh and direct as Safu could be, especially in all matters concerning Nezumi (and Nezumi’s four-year absence), she was honest. Straightforward, and sincere as she always was.

Whatever she had to say, Shion knew he probably needed to hear it. He nodded.

“You two are perhaps the least compatible people I have ever met.”

Shion winced. Safu held up a finger. “But that’s not news. Compatibility by definition is just a couple’s capacity to avoid conflict. You two have been in direct conflict since you were born, and yet somehow, you’ve managed to do some incredible things together. Of course, Nezumi hasn’t been around for everything, which you know my feelings about.”

Shion did. At length. He nodded.

“You’re not compatible. Not remotely, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be together, or that you’re never going to stay together. After all, you already have lived together once, haven’t you?”

“That’s true,” Shion said. “And it wasn’t as though we always got along then, either.”

Shion remembered more than once having to take a walk in the cold with one of Inukashi’s guard dogs because Nezumi was driving him out of his mind. How Nezumi would sometimes get so angry or anxious that he would either disappear somewhere or sit in the corner and read aggressively for hours.

“But it still worked out. You two understood each other where it mattered, eventually. So communicate with him. And communicate with him like an adult.”

“Like an adult,” Shion repeated, then frowned. Communication seemed so simple when it was purely hypothetical. In practice however… Shion had lost track of how many committee deals both he and Safu had botched because of her temper or his bluntness. Amateur mistakes. He couldn’t risk those with Nezumi, not now when their relationship wasn’t exactly new—but filled with unknowns.

“Thank you, Safu.”

Safu just waved her hand. She took a moment to rub the crease between her eyebrows. Shion watched as her fingers massaged up and down and shifted her bangs to the side. For a moment, Shion could see the faint outline of the scar from No. 6’s machines that crossed through the center of her forehead. All thoughts of apples and incompatibility left his head.

“Do you have a headache?”

“Yes,” Safu replied. “You. But that is nothing new.”

Safu dropped her hand from her forehead to punch him gently on the shoulder. Shion felt himself smile, infinitely grateful.

“It’s my turn to pay for coffee this week, isn’t it?” He offered, changing the subject.

“Yes, it is. That said, I was the one who spilled it, so I’ve got this one. Pour me another though– I need it after the day I’ve had.”

“Tell me about it.”

By the time they left the café, their coffee had been cold for hours.

* * *

Years of conditioning, self-defense mechanisms, and plain old dramatic flair were at play the second Nezumi entered the public eye. Shion was used to watching him transform from the private, petty boy he fell in love with to the dangerously sleek man that everyone naturally cleared a way for. Shion like to think he loved both sides of Nezumi equally, but the day Nezumi saw the New City’s grocery for the first time, it was the bright, amazed eyes of the boy in him, not the man, that made Shion’s heart soar.

Thanks to the committee’s efforts in irrigation projects for West block, a mountain of carefully-signed paperwork, and years of health testing for biotechnology– fresh produce was not only affordable to citizens but generously distributed outside the city limits.

Shion was fairly certain Nezumi had never seen that much fresh food before in his life, and it showed.

Even now, Nezumi would tag along on grocery store trips just to extend Shion’s trip by hours, ogling heads of lettuce and buying far too much. Nezumi’s budgeting system at age 16 was an 90-10 split between food and emergencies: and judging by his usual grocery cart, his budgeting had only evolved as much to include books and nothing else.

Their time together had formed a sort of pattern when grocery shopping: Nezumi pulling what felt like one of everything off the shelves, and Shion surreptitiously returning what they didn’t need when his back was turned.

My very own Penelope, undoing all my work.

Penelope undid her own work, Nezumi.

Fair enough.

It was good, and it worked for them, and the life in Nezumi’s eyes made occasionally buying 3 different versions of the same milk “Just to see if there’s a difference” absolutely worth it.

Today though, unfortunately, Nezumi was stuck in produce. Particularly the apples.

“Nezumi!” Shion attempted, “Look, cherries are in season!”

Nezumi smiled, secret, and added a box to their cart. “Thinking of making a cake?”

“Of course. And…” Shion tried to keep his voice level as possible. “They make great snacks. If you grab another box, you’ll be able to eat them all day.”

“Pass.”

Nezumi’s voice was firm enough that Shion blinked a few times.

“Did…something happen with cherries in your travels?”

“No.” Nezumi stared at the box for a long moment, and then added, voice darkening. “They have pits. What kind of tiny fruit has a huge pit right in the middle?”

Shion spoke carefully. “Nezumi, have you tried to eat a cherry whole before?”

Nezumi scowled.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Don’t start. I’m not getting cherries for anything besides cake, asshole.”

He then moved to the apples. Shion’s laughter stopped. He had to think fast.

“What about oranges? Those don’t even have a center like apples—”

“You are really on it about apples, Shion. Embarrassed by your impulses?” Nezumi’s grin was just this side of smug. Shion’s heart stuttered like a broken propeller.

“What—I.”

“You think I haven’t noticed the fact that every time I eat an apple you suddenly feel romance in the air?”

Communicate like an adult, Safu’s voice echoed in his brain.

Right, Shion agreed. He felt the words “you are a really loud apple cruncher” on his tongue, ready to go. But Nezumi was looking at him seriously, bag full of apples in his hand, with his new broad shoulders and short hair, and for a brief moment, Shion felt like he was looking at a different person.

“You got me,” Shion blurted.

“What?” replied Nezumi. “Wait seriously? You’re…into apples?”

Shion felt his soul chip off. Safu was never going to let him hear the end of this. “Just a little.”

Nezumi was silent for a long moment.

“Just when I think you can’t get any weirder…you pull this.”

Still staring at Shion, he added two more bags of apples to the cart. Shion’s face matched the reddest of them.

* * *

There were apples everywhere. On the sofa, the kitchen counter, by the bedside and even on Shion’s pillow. Since Nezumi was between shows, he had hours to prepare the apartment, which translated to filling it with as many apples as physically possible. Shion had some regrets. That said, in spite of the concerning number of apples and knowing looks, Nezumi hadn’t actually brought up Shion’s statement. He had been bizarrely quiet. Saturday morning changed that.

Crunch.

Nezumi was half-laying on the couch, head on the arm, with his feet in Shion’s lap. Shion was valiantly trying to ignore him by reading the newspaper, but every crunch forced him to start over the line he was currently reading. A true Sisyphean task.

“So is it the taste or the texture?” Nezumi asked between bites.

“The taste or texture of what?” Shion asked, without looking up.

“Apples. Seriously, what is it about them that gets to you? I’ve been running possibilities through my head for the last couple days and it just doesn’t line up. I have to know.”

The newspaper crinkled in Shion’s hands, he shut his eyes. Of course Nezumi was not going to let this quietly die.

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“Oh yes,” Nezumi said. “It’s Saturday. I held back and waited for you to finish your important agricultural meetings, so now you’re going to sit right there, Shion, and explain your apple kink to me.”

Shion could feel his face heating, but shock actually forced his blush down.

“You waited for my meetings to finish?”

Nezumi raised his eyebrows. “Was that an error?” He didn’t wait for Shion to reply and rubbed the apple he was eating against Shion’s arm as obnoxiously as possible. The apple skin was smooth and impossible to ignore. Shion’s heart beat in his ears. Nezumi’s voice sounded far away.

“Seriously, Shion, how is this sexy?”

“Do you think I’m the same person I was four years ago?” Shion asked.

Nezumi blinked. His apple was still firmly pressed against Shion’s bicep. “What?”

Shion stared at his newspaper. “Four years felt like a short amount of time when I was living it, there was so much to do, but I don’t know lately.”

Nezumi breathed in, seeming to recalibrate, and slowly set his apple on the nightstand. He was frowning. Nezumi’s hand covered his, and together, they closed the newspaper.

“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“I don’t know,” Shion said, honestly. “I don’t really know what this is about. We’re not sixteen anymore, and I don’t know if that changes nothing, or it means everything.”

The apples, Nezumi’s appearance, his hobbies, his unexpected patience, Safu. Compatibility. Time had passed and left them both behind and now, now they were living together and everything was the same as before but completely, completely different. Shion didn’t know how to reconcile it.

“I dreamed so often of having you back, of living together like this, but the reality of it– the day-to-day–“

“–is pretty fucking weird,” Nezumi finished. Shion blinked at the conviction in his voice. He finally faced him and found Nezumi oddly relaxed. The tightness around his eyes had disappeared and something tight unraveled in Shion’s chest. Shion wondered, for a moment, if he was holding back just as much.

“You think it’s weird too? But we lived together before, so…”

Nezumi huffed.

“Yeah, so we’d have to be ready, right? I thought the same thing. I figured I was relatively prepared, and especially after taking a four-year sabbatical in order to prepare for this– I damn well had to be ready. I really thought I was, but I wasn’t prepared for…Well I wasn’t prepared for annoying each other over stupider shit than starving or freezing. Like pissing you off by eating apples of all things.”

Shion gaped. “You knew?”

“Shion, and you’ve grown a bit more tactful over the last four years, but your face still gives you away completely. I thought you were going to stab me the first time I ate a honey crisp.”

“But you’ve still been–!” Shion stood, waved his arm around their apple filled apartment.

“Oh, yeah. I was messing with you.”

Shion saw red in so many different directions, but it may have just been the apples.

“Honestly, I just was trying to figure out what it would take to get you to tell me, instead of trying to be—whatever you’ve been trying to be lately.”

“Polite,” Shion supplied, and Nezumi laughed again. Shion made eye contact with an apple on the coffee table and felt profoundly ridiculous.

“You’re in my space,” he said, finally.

“Yeah,” Nezumi agreed. “And you’re in mine. You wash dishes really loudly by the way.”

Shion stared at Nezumi for a long moment.

“We’ve climbed a mountain of dead bodies together and we’re struggling with sharing an apartment?”

“This may be the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” Nezumi said, with such seriousness, Shion finally cracked. He laughed, a full laugh, more genuine than he’d felt in months, and rested his cheek on Nezumi’s shoulder.

“Harder than dealing with Elyurias?”

“Completely.”

“Think we’ll survive it?”

Nezumi smiled into Shion’s hair. Shion slowly smiled back, leaning closer.

This conversation was far from over, four years still stretched between them in an unexpectedly gaping chasm, and the house was full of apples– but for the first time, Shion felt like he was ready to deal with it, them, and everything.

“We always have.”


End file.
